The month before the 2018 midterms, a thousand theaters screened “The Trump Prophecy,” a film that tells the story of Mark Taylor, a former firefighter who claims that God told him in 2011 that Donald Trump would be elected president.

At a critical moment in the film, just after the actor representing Mr. Taylor collapses in the flashing light of an epiphany, he picks up a Bible and turns to the 45th chapter of the book of Isaiah, which describes the anointment of King Cyrus by God. In the next scene, we hear Mr. Trump being interviewed on “The 700 Club,” a popular Christian television show.

As Lance Wallnau, an evangelical author and speaker who appears in the film, once said, “I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” who will “restore the crumbling walls that separate us from cultural collapse.”

Cyrus, in case you’ve forgotten, was born in the sixth century B.C.E. and became the first emperor of Persia. Isaiah 45 celebrates Cyrus for freeing a population of Jews who were held captive in Babylon. Cyrus is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.

The identification of the 45th president with an ancient Middle Eastern potentate isn’t a fringe thing. “The Trump Prophecy” was produced with the help of professors and students at Liberty University, whose president, Jerry Falwell Jr., has been instrumental in rallying evangelical support for Mr. Trump. Jeanine Pirro of Fox News has picked up on the meme, as has Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, among many others.

As the Trump presidency falls under siege on multiple fronts, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called values voters will be among the last to leave the citadel. A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right is just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.

Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump.

Ralph Drollinger, who has led weekly Bible study groups in the White House attended by Vice President Mike Pence and many other cabinet members, likes the word “king” so much that he frequently turns it into a verb. “Get ready to king in our future lives,” he tells his followers. “Christian believers will — soon, I hope — become the consummate, perfect governing authorities!”

The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.

“When are they going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians?” Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, asked in 2016. If you’re hearing those boxcars pulling up in the distance, as it were, you don’t merely overlook the antisocial qualities of a prospective leader, you embrace them as virtues.

Mr. Trump himself well understands this longing for the hard hand of the despot “If you don’t mind me saying so, you’ve gotten soft,” he told Mr. Wallnau and other evangelical leaders during the 2016 campaign — much to their delight.

Another important thing to understand about Cyrus is that he is not a queen. In the Christian nationalist world, legitimate political power is largely male power. Mr. Drollinger insists that the Bible describes only “male leadership.”

Of course, there are those on the Christian right who have made a show of holding their noses while supporting Mr. Trump to advance their aims of stacking the Supreme Court or ending abortion. But we are kidding ourselves if we think their continuing support for him is purely transactional.

I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Mr. Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core.

They aren’t fighting a culture war.

They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.

For those of us on the left and the middle (and for some on the right), the ethos, rhetoric, and politics of Donald J. Trump are self-evidently evil. Thus, we conclude that those evangelical Christians who support him must act from depraved motives to the extent that his depravity appeals to them.

We see two obvious explanations of the fact that these conservative Christians support him in large numbers:

they have abandoned their once-noble principles, or

those principles were only ever a smokescreen behind which operated racism, classism, xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice.

.. I am just as sure that the obviousness of the moral meaning of the cause is a serious hindrance to it. The meaning of the struggle is no less true for becoming trite, but it is not the whole meaning. What follows is an attempt to see the less obvious element of that whole: support for Trump on the part of many evangelicals is a consistent outgrowth of a coherent political theology, one undertaken with noble intentions.

.. It seemed clear to many in Niebuhr’s time that the more we were committed to victory, the less acceptable it was to question our virtues or our enemies’ vices.

.. Niebuhr, however, is a realist. To him, realism means that descriptions of situations should be realistic rather than ideal, accurate even where inconvenient, rather than simple but inspiring.

.. As long as we understand and express only the obvious roots of this phenomenon in prejudice, and ignore the way in which those supporters understand themselves to be acting, we will prevent both meaningful dialogue and our own clarity about what is really going on.

.. Trump does not traffic in moral language. His is an almost entirely amoral political vocabulary, so it is hard to see how his supporters understand themselves to be supporting a moral project.

.. in his 2012 book Time to Get Tough, Trump called Obama and his diplomatic corps foolish, brainless “pansies” for not demanding half of Libya’s oil for the next twenty-five years in exchange for taking out Qadaffi.

.. That there were reasons not to make this deal other than idiocy and weakness does not seemed to have occurred to Trump. International law and norms of geopolitics are, from Trump’s perspective, for suckers.1

.. Many liberals thought Bush had mercenary intentions in the second Gulf war (making “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers), but Bush made it easier to imagine his supporters’ noble intentions because he framed the conflict in moral terms. Trump gives us none of that. His discourse is almost exclusively about power, self-interested negotiation, nationalism, size, strength, and so on.

Making empathy harder still, Trump is not just amorally calculating and commercial; he is openly immoral: vulgar, dishonest, petty, mean-spirited, racially insensitive, and so on.

Conservative (and especially white) evangelicals have a political vocabulary that is almost exclusively moralistic. They also value personal integrity and Christian principles in their politicians. This makes their approval of Trump opaque to those who don’t share it. What follows is my attempt to make their thinking more transparent.

Lynerd coins the term ‘republican theology’ (note the small ‘r’ in republican) to describe the way evangelicals understand American politics in relation to divine purpose. He provides a historical description of evangelical political thinking to explain what appears contradictory or hypocritical to many observers: the way evangelicals combine libertarianism with strict government regulation on moral issues, for example, being against government regulation of the economy, but in favor of government regulation of marriage.

.. he does not claim it is un-problematically consistent. Rather, he shows it to be part of a largely coherent, though imperfect, moral-political logic.

.. According to Lynerd, subscribers to republican theology—that is, most American evangelicals—believe that the United States has special religious and moral status—even to the point of being a “chosen nation.” That status is both ordained for and a result of our practice of proper religion and proper government. These form the necessary conditions of the development of personal morality, of virtue that allows citizens to direct themselves.

.. Political freedom, in turn, allows the practice of right religion, which inculcates virtue, which is required for limited government. Lynerd quotes evangelical writer Os Guiness: “Freedom requires virtue, which requires faith, which requires freedom, and so on, like the recycling triangle, ad infinitum.”3 For republican theology, America’s historic success resulted from a carefully maintained mutual reinforcement of proper religion, morality, and politics.

.. They see expansive government as a threat to both religion and morality. When the government interferes in religion and the economy, we lose the conditions and incentives to develop the morals that make self-government possible.

.. We can have the first sort of self-government if and only if we have citizens capable of the second sort: mature, self-sufficient, responsible, hard-working, generous people learning from and creating strong families, churches, businesses, and communities.

.. In such a society, government regulation of people’s lives is not needed or wanted. The one exception republican theology makes is for government action to preserve the conditions necessary for the formation of self-governing citizens: respect for life, marriage, family, decency, and so on.

.. This need for exceptions to protect the conditions of morality is the source of the tension between libertarianism and moralism in evangelical politics: we must limit the government to foster morality and use the government to protect it. Understanding this relation, we can see how limiting government in most cases, while advocating restrictive moral laws in specific cases, is not hypocrisy, so much as a balance which must be struck between competing impulses—and there are such tensions in all political philosophies.4

.. For many on the left, for example, government assistance for the poor is an obvious moral good. From the perspective of those who subscribe to republican theology, however, the liberal drive to “help the poor” through redistributive policies is not moral heroism, but a naïve misunderstanding of what actually helps people and the economy. They see government intervention in the economy as creating dependence, enervating creativity, and stunting both economic growth and the development of human beings

.. While liberals are regularly scandalized by how little conservative Christians seem to “care about the poor,” conservatives often oppose the expansion of government, at least in part, precisely for the sakeof the poor, both economically and morally.

.. The enthusiasm with which evangelical culture-warriors and champions of faith and family have embraced this secular, East coast, and thrice-married vulgarian is—on its surface—base hypocrisy, explicable only through unprincipled prejudice and ignorance. With reference to republican theology, however, we can see that—for many evangelicals—supporting Trump is at least in part the product of a coherent-if-imperfect, religio-political perspective faced with a difficult ethical tradeoff.

.. interpreting evangelical support for Trump as simply evil and ignorance obscures the drive for moral goods that lies behind it.

.. Lots of disastrous, even evil, political movements have been pursued for noble ends. It should prompt to us frame our criticism differently, however.

.. instead of dreaming up ever more strident denunciations of their evil intentions, we should try to show how their good aims have become confused or disordered.

Niebuhr helps us see that there are three confusions built into republican theology, affecting each of its three pillars:

moral self-government,

limited government, and

proper religion.

1) First, republican theology is confused about when the government should intervene to protect morality, favoring only a narrow and private set of issues—mainly marriage, gender issues, and the like. When they think about economics, the government’s job is exclusively negative. Republican theologians do not often think about positive government intervention as necessary to preserve the moral-pedagogical role of the markets.

.. actual political practice has been more pragmatic, collectivist, and proactive than our creeds describe. As an example, Niebuhr notes that Thomas Jefferson was a champion of small government and an idealist about the potential for citizens to self-regulate, but also a realist about the economic conditions required. Jefferson believed, like many evangelicals today, that the economy was a school of virtue, but he believed that one could only matriculate in that school through independent land ownership.

.. He used the government to distribute wealth to the common person to help shape a society in which his creed made sense. Thus, he saw that the exceptions to libertarianism we need in defense of morality included material interventions to make economic participation more generally available.

Niebuhr believes that Jefferson’s realism worked and the federal effort to expand the frontier in the 1800s served as a massive infusion of wealth into the working class.

.. Economic opportunity meant the government had to do much less to maintain social order. He writes: “It can hardly be denied that the fluidity of our class structure, derived from the opulence of economic opportunities, saved us from the acrimony of the class struggle in Europe…When the frontier ceased to provide for the expansion of opportunities, our superior technology created ever new frontiers for the ambitious and adventurous.”5We have been able to avoid more aggressive government involvement in society because economic fluidity has mitigated the social tension that requires government intervention.

.. With the frontier closed and industry no longer expanding, we will face new threats to our freedom: populist and authoritarian politicians who promise they can restore economic opportunity through regressive and nationalistic policies. Niebuhr foresees the end of easy economic fluidity if industrialization ever ceases to provide a path into the property-owning classes. He concludes that, “ultimately we must face some vexatious issues of social justice” that have arisen in Europe and which will require the same sort of pragmatic social management they have developed.

.. Republican theology has become absolute in its opposition to government involvement in the economy. However, there is no reason it cannot learn from America’s past and see such intervention as in service of morality by allowing access to the economy, rather than as dependence-causing disincentives to such participation. This sort of exception to libertarianism should be in line with the basic logic of republican theology.

.. providing universal quality education, protecting sustainably productive land, ensuring a healthy population, and guaranteeing a path from steady work to property ownership. These strike me as areas in which bipartisan cooperation should be possible.

.. 2) The second confusion involved in evangelical support of Trump concerns the belief that limiting government always results in an increase of the kind of freedom republican theology values.

.. This confusion is the result of a naive view of power. Niebuhr’s description of the bourgeois liberal describes the modern conservative well. Such a person is, “oblivious both to the elements of power in society and to the disproportions of power in economic life. Power, in the thought of the typically bourgeois man, is political. He believes it must be reduced to a minimum.”6 In the discourse of contemporary conservatism, political power is the only type that threatens economic freedom.

.. Conservative evangelicals believe that a reduction in government involvement in the economy removes the problem of power, resulting in free encounters between individuals. They are under what Niebuhr calls the “illusion of classical liberalism that power is not an important element in man’s social life.”7 They assume that competing interests make for justice without regulation.

.. Niebuhr, however, insists that such organic justice would be possible “only if the powers which support interest were fairly equally divided, and they never are.”8 What Niebuhr recognizes and republican theology misses is that imbalances in economic power are as great a threat to the wellbeing and freedom of individuals as political power.

.. It was largely impossible for black Americans to buy homes in the South under Jim Crow. This is overt political power, the kind that worries republican theology. What is less well known is that it was also largely impossible for black Americans to buy homes in places like Chicago. Private real estate covenants outlawing selling or renting to African Americans in whole neighborhoods, racist lending policies, and great inequalities in capital did the job nearly as effectively as the laws of the South.

.. All great imbalances in power lead inevitably to injustice. Corporations and the rich can collude to lower wages, to create dangerous conditions for workers, to pollute the air and water, to sell dangerous products, to sway elections and public opinion, and generally exert their influence irresponsibly. Less insidiously, the wealthy can simply outcompete the poor in the race for important goods and services.

.. there is no reason to think that a decrease in the deployment of political power in the economy will automatically lead to a proportional increase in individual freedom. Covert forms of power will fill the vacuum emptied by the state

.. We must use the power of constitutional democracy to check both the rise of authoritarian politics and the hegemony of irresponsible capital. We need checks against tyranny, but we also need strong consumer and labor protections and corporate transparency, and we must protect democracy from distortion by the influence of money. Freedom does not blossom where government retreats; freedom is possible when power, including the government, checks power, including economic power, in defense of the individual.

.. 3) Finally, there is significant confusion regarding the third and final leg of the republican theology stool: proper Christian faith as a necessary precondition of a flourishing democracy. I see many problems here, but allow me to highlight just one.

.. Niebuhr notes that the earliest Puritan settlers believed God’s will to be inscrutable and did not count their initial successes as merited blessings. He calls their transition from such pious humility to bright confidence that their success came from their faith and virtues a “descent from Puritanism to Yankeeism.”10 Lynerd, likewise, notes that the “evangelical gospel of the First Great Awakening” (think Jonathan Edwards), with its “dim view of human perfectibility” was something “republican theology…had to overcome.”11

.. Niebuhr’s work picks up a strain of pessimism about human perfectibility that runs through Augustine and Luther, which is deeply ambivalent about any straightforward connection between either faith and virtue or virtue and flourishing. Republican theologians would be well served to recognize that their take on this is not the only, or even the majority, Christian position.

.. In a forthcoming article12 in Sociology of Religion, Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joseph O. Baker argue that what they call “Christian nationalism” was a “robust predictor of voting for Donald Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally.”

.. Where republican theology holds up political liberty as the necessary condition of right faith, Christian nationalism prefers the government to privilege Christianity. Sociologists identify Christian nationalism in their subjects by testing agreement with statements like, “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” or disagreement with ones like “the federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.”

.. According to the authors of the study, Christian nationalism draws heavily on Old Testament themes wherein Israel was “commanded to maintain cultural and blood purity, often through war, conquest, and separatism.” Christian nationalism, in actual practice, thus often carries with it racialized notions of purity.

.. I do not think that republican theology is necessarily tied to Christian nationalism or that Christian nationalism is necessarily racist. That said, it is an empirical fact that republican theology, Christian nationalism, and racism often overlap in our society.

.. This is a sociological, not a priori, criticism. While there is no necessary causation between republican theology, nationalism, xenophobia, and racism, I want to suggest that their overlap is also not accidental.

.. As long as we identify early America as a successful economic and political experiment andcredit that success to morality and religionand we are willing to make exceptions to libertarianism to protect the preconditions of that success, then we will face the constant temptation to elide culture, race, religion, and morality and to use the government to enforce racial, cultural, and religious purity.

.. If republican theology is going to persist as a defensible option in American politics, it has to separate itself, consistently and vocally, from the tribal and bigoted elements of Christian nationalism.

.. The more evangelicals support figures like Trump, who embody “nationalism” more than “Christian” and are so publicly and unrepentantly immoral and who (at the very least) signal to bigots that they are friendly to their cause, the harder it will be for others to see any moral meaning to their behavior. The obvious meaning of that support will become, even more than it is now, the only visible meaning.

Can a mix of liberal politics and soft traditionalism survive a militant left and a right-wing Israel?

..Every #metoo scandal is different, but most are alike in at least one way.. the fall of prominent men usually accelerates some pre-existing debate about where the larger institution or culture should be going, and which side of its internal arguments deserves to gain.

.. In answering his accusers Cohen has embraced the clichés of male big shot contrition — promising a “consultation with clergy, therapists and professional experts” and “a process of education, recognition, remorse and repair.

.. his fall has inspired a critique not only of his behavior but also his life’s work .. his sexual sins should prompt a larger reappraisal of “the troubling gender and sexual politics long embedded in communal discussions of Jewish continuity and survival.”

.. the longstanding angst within the American Jewish community around assimilation, intermarriage and fertility tends to sustain a kind of soft traditionalist pressure even in liberal Jewish life — one that defines Jewish identity in exclusionist terms, they complain, while marginalizing “single women, queer people, unwed parents, and childless individuals or couples.”

.. a “liberalism without/conservatism within” combination is common to minority populations, and it’s a particularly reasonable reaction to the experience of Jewish history: An oft-persecuted people’s flourishing can both depend on maintaining a certain conservatism about its own patterns of marrying and begetting and cultural transmission (and, in the case of Israel, the safety of its lonely nation-state), and on encouraging liberalism and cosmopolitanism in the wider, potentially-hostile order in which the diaspora subsists.

.. the fear among many politically liberal Jews that if they don’t sustain a certain familial traditionalism, they’ll just cede the Jewish future to the ultra-fecund ultra-Orthodox.)

.. Benjamin Netanyahu has embraced the view that European Jewry’s old enemy, Christian nationalism, is less dangerous to the Jewish future than the dissolving effects of liberal cosmopolitanism and the threat posed by Islamist anti-Semitism.

Such a God might, for instance, offer political success as a temptation rather than a reward — or use an unexpected presidency not to save Americans but to chastise them.

.. so far the Trump presidency has clearly been a kind of apocalypse — not (yet) in the “world-historical calamity” sense of the word, but in the original Greek meaning: an unveiling, an uncovering, an exposure of truths that had heretofore been hidden.

.. That exposure came first for the Republican Party’s establishment, who were revealed as something uncomfortably close to liberal caricature in their mix of weakness, cynicism and power worship. It came next for the technocrats and the data nerds of the Democratic Party, who were revealed as ineffectual, clueless and self-regarding ..

.. And then it came for a range of celebrated media men, from Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer ..

.. It has come as well for figures whose style anticipated him (Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, that whole ménage) and for figures who have deliberately attached themselves to his populist revolt. The sins of Roy Moore were more exposed by the Trump era, and now likewise the racist paranoia of Roseanne Barr.

.. a similar moral exposure has come to precisely the sector of American Christianity where support for Donald Trump ran strongest — the denominational heart of conservative evangelicalism, the Southern Baptist Convention.

.. The main case is Paige Patterson, the now-erstwhile president of a major Baptist seminary in Fort Worth, who was eased into retirement over revelations that he’d counseled abused women to return to their husbands and allegedly shamed and silenced at least one rape victim.

.. Patterson is a beginning, not an end.

.. Late last year I wrote an essay speculating about the possibility of an “evangelical crisis” in this era, driven by the gap between the older and strongly pro-Trump constituency in evangelical churches and those evangelicals, often younger, who either voted for the president reluctantly or rejected his brand of politics outright.

.. “the big story behind the story of Patterson’s fall is a high-stakes showdown between two generations of Southern Baptist leaders.” Both generations are theologically conservative, but the figures raising their voices against Patterson have been — generally — associated with a vision of their church that’s more countercultural, less wedded to the institutional Republican Party, more likely to see racial reconciliation as essential to the Baptist future and intent on proving that a traditional theology of sex need not lead to sexism.

.. Whereas Patterson’s defenders represent — again, to generalize — the more pro-Trump old guard in the Baptist world, with a strong inclination toward various forms of chauvinism and Christian nationalism.

.. It is not a coincidence that Russell Moore, perhaps the most prominent anti-Trump Baptist, provided early support to Patterson’s critics — while Robert Jeffress, whose Dallas church sets “Make America Great Again” to music, labeled the calls for Patterson’s resignation a “witch hunt.”

.. it’s wiser to regard an era of exposure like this one as a test, which can be passed but also failed. A discredited “old guard” doesn’t automatically lose power; a chauvinism revealed doesn’t just evaporate. And the temptation to dismiss discomfiting revelations as fake news, to retreat back into ignorance and self-justification, is at least as powerful as the impulse to really reckon with the truth.

.. So the question posed by this age of revelation is simple: Now that you know something new and troubling and even terrible about your leaders or your institutions, what will you do with this knowledge?